Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Local, Local, Local

When it comes to the future of local advertising, Dave Morgan is someone to watch. He’s the Wayne Gretzky of the online advertising world – a guy who’s always skating to where the puck will be. (He even looks like Gretzky.) And in an interview we did with him recently, I found his thoughts on the future of local media right on the mark.

We interviewed Dave at the Grand Hyatt in New York last month as he was attending an advertising conference where the CEOs of Yahoo and AOL had just spent a lot of time talking about their biggest advertising opportunity: You guessed it, “local.”

Dave will be back at the Grand Hyatt next month as a keynote speaker at our 2010 Local Online Advertising Conference. You can see our interview with him on YouTube, or learn more about the conference here.

Dave has been at the forefront (in front of it actually) of ad-serving systems such as 24/7 RealMedia and Tacoda, which he founded and then sold to AOL for $247 million two years ago. He’s steeped in local media. When I met him 15 years ago, he was general counsel for the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association looking for a way to get step into the Internet skating rink.

So where is local media headed? “All too often,” he says, “we’ve always seen local as about channels – local is newspapers or local is radio or local is television or local is directories. But that’s not how things are happening in the emerging media economy. It’s now more about the customers in the market as they’re trying to reach local and they’re trying to understand now how they work with all the different touch points to reach consumers and for the merchants to be able to best exploit their marketing dollars.”

Thought Dave is right, it’s not an easy concept for traditional media companies to grasp. That’s why we’ve asked the people who are following that path – the Yodles, Local.coms, Reply.coms and other fast-growing local online advertising companies – to address the conference. They’re offering local advertisers multiple touch points that in the end makes the phone ring or drives store traffic.

Dave believes we’re at a crucial point in the evolution of local media. “It’s a really important time,” he says, “here in new York City, essentially the headquarrters of advertisers and marketing the world, to have a really important conference focused on local.”